The Way We Were

Some time ago I happened across an article by Gary North wherein he did something uncharacteristic of a professor of that hybrid Libertarian-Postmillennial philosophy of the neo-Theonomists: he waxed nostalgic. More than nostalgic, he actually confessed things to have been objectively better in the past than the present. And it didn’t even have anything to do with reflections on the freer market of yesteryear, the greater affordability of postage stamps, the superior quality of American steel, the production cost of rubber nipples, or the liquidity of the sundry widgets with which economists are generally absorbed. On the contrary, it ran a sentimental gamut from the innocence of golden-age cinema to the quaintness of small-town life in his childhood, to the patriotism of earlier generations, to Fourth of July orations, to public morality and a sense of shared culture lost. All very uncharacteristic of the sterile algorithms of better-living-through-chemistry, open-border, multicult economism for which his clique is otherwise known. One secondhand anecdote he mentions is poignant:

There is a scene in “It Happened One Night” (1934), where Clark Gable is riding in a bus. The bus is lighted inside, and everyone is singing. For years, I thought that scene was filler. My friend and master journalist Otto Scott, age 85, tells me that singing on Greyhound buses was common in those days, though with lights off. Strangers sang on buses.

Such a small and comforting grace, North laments the fact that by his time social cohesion had eroded to the point where this instinctual ritual was lost. Albeit a small segue, it strikes the deepest chord in the essay, bespeaking the underlying issue on which he otherwise will not directly look: it really couldn’t happen today except in the most homogeneous enclaves. Beyond the fact that the multicult denizens of the land today share little in the way of folk expression and symbols, the songs of those disparate groups tend to be highly offensive to every group but their own. And none but such a homogeneous society with precisely the root depth which ours had could have produced the cultural architecture which he spied in impromptu choruses or the comparatively wholesome media milieu of his youth.

Here’s an anecdote from my own life confirming North’s observations of modern America’s drift from innocence: a couple decades past when I attended a Fourth of July celebration at Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California, the event featured a line-up of very WASPy bands, some in colonial dress, others in mid-nineteenth century waistcoats and cumberbuns. They played everything from the National Anthem to the Ride of Paul Revere to Bunker Hill to Dixie. But all these Americana songs and motifs evoked not cheers, but boos, cursing, and mockery from the majority-Mestizo park-goers. Defiant, many screamed, “Viva la Raza!,” “Viva la Mayheeco!” and many other things I’ll not relay here. Alongside the Mestizos, the Blacks milling about beatboxed and rapped vulgarities interlaced with unintelligible gibbering in attempts to overshout what they derided as “racist Cracker music” and “goofy-ass Whiteboy music.” Intent on intimidating and demoralizing the strawhatted and bowtied White musicians, they glowered and gyrated libidinously, waving middle fingers aloft, barking profanity at them. While they may all have appreciated the evening’s fireworks, it was plain that none of these diverse “citizens” had come to celebrate the attainment of independence for the American colonies from Britain or our founding of a limited republic based upon Anglo-Saxon Christian Law. They had not the slightest inkling of such matters. Even if they had been propagandized K through 12 in the new mythos that they represent the true apotheosis of American identity, they could see naught in such traditional displays but triumphal White history and identity. They counted all the memes of Americana an affront to their new and true American identities. I feel slightly silly having to explain something so obvious, but such are our days: non-White people are generally quite offended by American history. The further back, the more so. Because it is European. Because America and the West are the legacy of the White Christian uniquely. What Whites – Gary North included – see as the ‘good old days’, non-whites tend to see as the absolute definition of evil.

Most remarkably, this heterogeneous view – that true Americanism is multiculturalism – is affirmed now as much by GOP laureate historian Harry Jaffa as by socialist historian Howard Zinn. Whatever their differences, each of these schools of thought retroactively imposes the same central assumptions upon our history – that multiculturalism, multiracialism, and religious pluralism are the lodestones of Americanism, supportive of “our highest ideal”: equality. This grasping for equality is the native temptation of covetous and interloping aliens, but Americans once not long ago, and nigh to a man, repudiated such Jacobin notions. However, all the new state-sanctioned interpretations, different though they be in many ways, unanimously promulgate the vantage of the outgroup and subversive minorities intent on deposing and humbling “ourselves and our posterity” as the true American view.

But that is not to say that Leftist and Rightist egalitarianism do not differ. They do. Jewish Radicals such as Zinn, the SPLC, ADL, ACLU, and the myriad Afrocentrist groups markedly differ from Libertarians and NeoCons in that they openly revile all pre-Civil Rights history, including the triumph of our colonies, the taming of the wilderness, the winning of the West, the upholding of natural aristocracy, localism, the establishment of our republic, and all the graces of settled Christian society in the new world as the single darkest passage in human history. Meanwhile, the GOP/Libertarian axis (white as the driven snow, generally) such as North, have appropriated those same equality-mongering presuppositions and reconstrued them as somehow foundational and supportive of the America they knew prior to the Civil Rights revolution. Though they esteem the America of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anne of Green Gables, Johnny Tremain, and the traditional outlook of historians like Israel Smith Clare, as well as Madison Grant, and favoring the historiography of the Dunning School, they yet profess the same central doctrine of nation and peoplehood in keeping with antichrist bloviator Michael Moore – the propositional nation over against Blood and Soil.

Even my own Mexican and Filipino friends who accompanied me that night, though multi-generational Christians all, and raised in America, reacted with glee at all the disgraceful hijinks of the other non-White ethnics present, while my White friends and I stood disgusted with the disrespect shown to the society under whose wing they sheltered. All else being equal, the only ones who identified with the symbols and tropes of the War of Independence and the symbols of our founding were my fellow Whites. Meanwhile, our non-White friends were only dismayed at our outrage. Things approaching the holy to us were at best trifling oddities to them, and at worst, great evils to be suppressed or abrogated. Yes, the only thing to prompt outrage from my non-White friends was the inexplicable reverence we Whites had for the colonial tableau and the great drama of our forefathers’ battle against arbitrary government. They simply could not identify with our sires’ fight for liberty under God, because our forefathers bore theirs no resemblance by creed nor breed.

Clearly, in order for strangers to sing impromptu songs of a folk-patriotic character together in the dark they must have a certain degree of shared experience preceding them for generations. They must have a similitude of values, identifying with the same heroes, tokens, symbols, and hereditary roots in the same civilization. They must trust one another instinctually. They must see themselves in their fellows. In short, they must be brethren rather than strangers.

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk –
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control –
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf –
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.1

Even those come of the same tribes may oft differ enough creedally that they cannot sing all the same songs. Such is the case amongst our churches, in that both psalter and hymnal Calvinists eschew all the repetitious “free-will” songs and often heretical ditties of Arminians and Charismatics. How much less, then, can they of foreign race, culture, language, and creed see the world through our eyes, speak the same sentiments, love the same heroes, and sing the same songs? Granting even that they learn our tongue, their own non-White identities import incongruous assumptions and irreconcilable perspectives to virtually every word uttered between us.

It’s obvious that this whole train of thought sits uneasy with North. Because in his worldview he really hasn’t anyplace to put it, as Libertarianism itself is an apologetic for radical pluralism – the negation and repudiation of the very social solidarity for which we find him here pining. Under the rubric of his atomized theory of society he cannot locate the value of the commodities under consideration, because they do not appear on the NASDAQ. Even if that lost social capital compels him to acknowledge some great value in it, it cannot be appraised in pennypound. It has no trade value against sterling. And its loss cannot be construed as any net advancement of the millennium. His economic toolbox has no conceptual implements by which social capital and alienation can be weighed and measured. It is apparent that he has momentarily slipped the well-worn channels for which his barrow is fitted. We can see his wheels slipping the furrows. But falteringly, he seems to gain traction enough for an inkling of the fact that there are no palliative markets left to a dispossessed pariah people such as his have become.

But just as he would seem to begin writing in the voice of Robert Putnam of his Heimatand Hiraeth, it no doubt dawned on him that the tragedy of the revolution of sentiment under his inspection is diversity-driven and the necessary consequent of his own laissez-faire socio-economic theory no less than that of the statist central planners. At which point he leaves off this homesick scenic drive for the myopic monetary paths which he plods to this day, eyes firmly fixed on the consoling tracks laid by the money-changers who have auctioned the world he knew and the birthright of his children out from under them.

Back when this society was still largely ours, it was entirely expected to hear public expressions of the Christian faith – especially around the holidays. Like so many of us, North is haunted by the memory of White Protestant America as it was. Little things like Ernie Ford and Gordon MacRae singing “O Holy Night” on prime-time television. His was the first generation raised with television. Americans were tapping their feet to the Gilbert and Sullivan Minstrel Show. Agatha Christie’s bestseller, Ten Little Niggers, was adapted to film under the title And Then There Were None in ’45 and again under the original title in ’49. Both the book and film adaptations were released with aplomb and met with praise in both America and England. Audiences saw no offense in Abbott and Costello’s comedic adventure Africa Screams.

Though we still held a de facto cultural hegemony, North’s young life was defined by the rise of the American suburb, a nationwide migration away from our cities which were otherwise being encroached upon by other races. Today it would be called ‘White Flight,’ but it was then taken for granted as nothing but good parenting to remove your children from the eminent danger which foreign races pose them. In the America North knew, playing Cowboys and Indians was taken for granted as the most wholesome thing imaginable for little boys. (It’s considered a “hate crime” now.) The Ballad of Davy Crockett was beloved by all, unreservedly. Children were thrilled to hear the Daniel Boone theme song come over the airwaves every day. Prince Valiant was buttressed by Tarzan, Johnny Quest, Popeye, and Dick Tracey in the Sunday funny papers. Those characters unapologetically dispatched African and Indian Savages, Mohammedans, Oriental Huns, Japs, Goons from Goon Island, and all other existential threats to Western civilization. Even popular syndicated strips with titles like “White Boy,” about a Christian child kidnapped by Sioux Indians, upheld the White race unflinchingly.

Though totally suppressed later, this was a time throughout which Walt Disney released scores of wonderfully traditional films celebrating the history and advance of European Christendom. But that was before Tom & Jerry episodes were prefaced with “trigger warnings.” Before they began mass cartoon bans because they said words like “Mammy.” It was also before they rewrote Mark Twain’s books to purge them of a word which leftists deemed offensive well after the fact, discontinuing Nigger Jim. Prior, they banned Gone With the Wind, Moby Dick, The Call of the Wild, and – most ironically – Fahrenheit 451. The works of Rudyard Kipling – which bore swastikas on their covers, by the way – were cherished. Charles Lindbergh was still seen as one of the greatest heroes of the modern age; and that after his having published his famous article “Aviation, Geography, and Race” in Reader’s Digest, calling for the natal solidarity of Europeans world.

In spite of the irrepressible division of the Brothers’ War, Dixie was one of the most popular songs in America, both sides of the Mason-Dixon. And the Confederate war dead – defamed as “traitors” today – were reckoned heroes and patriots even by the descendants of those who fought for the Union. The Confederate Battle Flag was accepted universally as both a thoroughly Christian and sublimely American flag. Notwithstanding many contradictions by that day, Americans were yet unconsciously immersed in the tapestry of western, antebellum, colonial, medieval, and biblical narratives which comprise the legacy and milieu from which we proceed. It was our heritage, our identity. Our farmers were heroes to us alongside the knights, explorers, cavaliers, pilgrims, settlers, planters, minutemen, frontiersmen, and cowboys gone before. Norman Rockwell’s iconic covers for the Saturday Evening Post glorified the normal as much as N.C. Wyeth’s had in Scribner’s Magazine before him. No one thought them scandalous at the time, but today all that bourgeois imagery is deemed infamous “White supremacy.”

Even if many people had grown negligent of the Scripture personally, it yet permeated the culture to such a degree that if someone said, “Ho, what word, Uriah?”, “Kane shall be razed!”, or “the apple of his eye,” everyone was through usage familiar with their meanings. Even the myriad para-biblical Aesopian folk sayings such as “a rolling stone gathers no moss” or references to “sour grapes” required no further explanation, as they do now. And even if the anticommunist movement of the 50s and 60s is retrospectively decried in Academia and the media as having been some fringe extremism outside true American sentiment, anticommunism was entirelymainstream then. The Dan Smoot Report newsletter boasted 33,000 paid subscribers, and his weekly show was broadcast prime-time on television and radio. It was back before Walmart and all the corporate chains ran all the mom-and-pop businesses into the ground, when bookstores and barbershops were still American institutions, and when the hardware store was locally owned. A great deal of Arminian and Charismatic error by that point notwithstanding, street preachers, public hymn sings (especially at Christmas), and Christian tracts were common idiosyncrasies of American culture. And our Anglo-Saxon language had not yet been redacted by the multicult to render so many mundane words contraband. North lived through the political formation of what came to be known as “The Religious Right.” Well in advance of the Roe v. Wade issue, “The Moral Majority” roared to life in opposition to racial integration. That was before the bastards in D.C. actually used troops against American kids to force them to integrate with negroes. Literally at gunpoint. “This used to be America.” Though American culture was, by North’s time, already in precipitous decline, he had the tremendous benefit of civilizational furniture in the early 1940s which, in retrospect from the Obamanation of 2016, looks like “The Valley of Love and Delight.”

As an aside, the question begs to be asked: why, throughout the course of all the responses to Black riots and murderous rampages, did the government insist on only non-lethal peacekeeping methods such as tear gas, batons, shields, rubber bullets, hoses, and so on, but opted to deploy 101st Airborne troops with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets against White children declining to attend school with negroes? This landmark violation of the Posse Comitatus Act against White children who wanted only to not be aggressed upon by Blacks bespeaks much in the way of the liberal view of race. And it continues today, as we see perennial Black riots met with non-lethal force as a rule, but woe betide the White ranching family that dares stand up for their God-given and constitutional rights, as the Bundies did recently. They are met with assault rifles, military snipers, and predator drones. But I digress.

As journalist-turned-satirist Lewis Grizzard put it,

I had a handle on things in 1962. It was the year I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license. . . Whenever I wanted french fries in 1962, Mama would cut potatoes by hand and cook them for me. Movies hadn’t become ‘films,’ most of them still made sense, and nobody in them – unless they were made in Sweden – got naked. I had a large collection of Elvis records in 1962 and hung out at my hometown truckstop that had an all-country jukebox featuring Hank Williams, Faron Young, Jim Reeves, Earnest Tubb, Kitty Wells, and Patsy Cline. I had a pretty blonde girlfriend. The best thing on television was Gunsmoke. . . .
I slept well in 1962.
But the very next year, somebody shot the president. . . .
Then the Beatles came.
Then all hell broke loose.
And changes began to unravel my simple, neat world. What once was good became bad. What once was unthinkable became acceptable. . . .
Girls wanted to be in the Boy Scouts. Later, homosexuals wanted to be in the Boy Scouts.
The ‘isms’ came. Racism, sexism. The phobias came. Homophobia, xenophobia. . . .
Miami was lost to the Cubans. San Francisco was lost to the hippies, and then to the homosexuals. . . .
It’s been thirty years since 1962. . . . I still don’t want to be around homosexuals, remain convinced Bernie Goetz did the right thing when he shot those punks on the New York subway. . . .
This book is dedicated to everyone just like me, the Lord have mercy upon us.2

The popular American memes and symbols of Mr. North’s nativity are no longer admitted. They have been stricken from the books. All the little graces which defined America then are, in full Orwellian fashion, denounced as un-American today. For in multicult America, Columbus Day is an offense to Indians, Mexicans, Blacks, and Jews. Thanksgiving is repudiated by the same people for the same reasons. Christmas, as well, for that matter, as the whole liturgical calendar, is reviled by Jews and Muslims. Jews and Blacks have compelled an overwrite of the Christian observance of Lee-Jackson Day with the communist MLK Day. The Celtic Cross, the Crusaders’ Cross, the St. Andrew’s Cross, the Iron Cross, the Fiery Cross, and the Bent Cross are all now deemed ‘hate symbols’ and ostensibly outlawed on account of the various cultures flooding across our libertarian style borders. And all crosses are being purged from public view by courtcraft of the folks at the ACLU, SPLC, and ADL. Ten Commandments monuments, Confederate flags, and monuments to all our Confederate heroes, Founding Fathers, and colonial heroes are being removed, and their graves desecrated, in the name of this new Americanism*. Because crosses, Christian law, and American liberty are universally rebuked now as White supremacy.

The folk traditions and cultural characteristics which White Christians have taken for granted as judicious and universal goods, and the loss of which North himself laments, have proven in many respects affinities unique to us alone, naught but offensive presumption in the eyes of most other peoples. Certainly, those of other races who claim Christ will no doubt affirm the Golden Rule, and we have no reason to doubt their sincerity; however, the principle of doing unto others has been studiously applied amongst the Japhethite tribes so long that the gradual permutations and circumstantial implications of it have resulted in what we know as “manners,” “etiquette,” “propriety,” “decorum,” and social subtleties such as magnanimity and empathic altruism. Neither have many other races absorbed concepts such as “personal boundaries” for appropriate speaking distance, or the universal White assumption that you don’t touch other people’s things without permission, or that it’s impolite to speak of personal matters in public, or to speak so loudly in public that others have no choice but to overhear one’s personal discussions, or to play your music so loudly that your neighbors must partake in it too. While a little thing like Western table manners seems to the White mind like obvious implication of the Golden Rule, Christians of other races, in spite of their affirmation of the Apostles’ Creed or even TULIP, have little conception of such civil graces as we know them. Because their peoples haven’t spent millennia with the law etching into their habits and mannerisms as ours have. And it is part and parcel of the European’s empathic altruism that we recognize the handicaps of other peoples and their histories in these respects. But even that forbearance on our part, when known to other races, is seen by them as a most patronizing condescension. On balance, the horns of that dilemma admit no out – if we hold Christianized and Americanized equatorial peoples amongst us to the same standards we expect of our own, we have laid a yoke on them which, while light as air to us, they can almost never bear. In which case they decry us for ‘racists,’ bigots, and White supremacists for expecting them to live by our millennia-calibrated cultural norms; and if we do the opposite, accepting their ethnic handicaps as the relative threshold of their capacities under God, or simply as different expressions of Christian folkways demonstrative of the pluriformity of Christian cultures, we are denounced for holding to a paternalist ‘racism’ of lowered expectations. All of which underscores the moral necessity of the separatism maintained up until about five decades ago. By house, community, state, region, and nation, segregation is obvious as the normative and only efficacious remedy.

Even if our turncoat pulpits are loath to admit it, the federal expungement of the color line, the orchestrated rise of miscegenation, and the planned proliferation of alien peoples amongst us has moved apace of the degeneration and apostasy of the White race in America as well. Everyone knows diversity and apostasy have blossomed synergistically in this country. Rather than making the stranger better, the strangers have only made us worse. Or as Matthew Henry phrased it,

They were sworn unto him [Tobiah], not as their prince, but as their friend and ally, because both he and his son had married daughters of Israel, v. 18. See the mischief of marrying with strangers; for one heathen that was converted by it ten Jews were perverted. When once they became akin to Tobiah they soon became sworn to him. A sinful love leads to a sinful league.3

The conservative tradition is white and Protestant in part because black Protestant culture has followed its own path to cultural pluralism and liberal politics. Both religion and race have mattered for conservatives who view nationhood as anchored in white, native-stock peoples and their distinctive culture. . . . [C]onservatives have been cultural, religious, and at times racial nationalists, dedicated to protecting America’s superior civilization from racially or culturally inferior peoples, foreign ideologies, sexual deviance, ecumenical religion, or the encroachment of a so-called one-world government.4

Note his irrefutable point that all along Black Christianity in America has been monolithically liberal – even prior to the Civil Rights revolution and the invasion of other races, they were polarized against the traditional Protestant orthodoxy of the White majority. Even when race wasn’t a factor, such as with respect to the Catholic Irish and Italians or the German 48ers, their variance from our Protestant faith was a profound impediment to their assimilation, but they at length did assimilate, many taking up our religion and ethics. But no racial outgroup has broken with their patterns of antagonism against our ancient liberties. Even when claiming the Christian faith for generations, non-Whites move in ethnic lockstep opposite not only Whites, but traditional Americanism and orthodox Christianity.

Or as Martin E. Marty has elucidated:

[E]thnicity is the skeleton key of religion in America because it provides ‘the supporting framework,’ ‘the bare outlines or main features,’ of American religion. . . .

The black child in the ghetto or the Amerindian youngster may engage in ceremonies of civil religion. But they may think of something quite different from the world of the white child’s pilgrims or founders when they sing of a ‘land where my fathers died.’ This is the land where their fathers were enslaved or killed. . . . The delineations of civil religion are never universal in origin, content, ethos, or scope; they are informed by the experience of the delineator’s own ethnic subcommunities.5

Marty’s thesis is confirmed by that of another, one of the great historiographical works of recent times: Albion’s Seed by D.H. Fischer, which posits that the conservative Christian character and founding institutions of America were due to the folkways of her homogeneous population of Teutonic-British origins. The thesis of that work – this “Teutonic Germ theory” – which he recounts was the prevailing understanding of America’s institutions and culture up until the mid-twentieth century, when abstract Boasian egalitarianism and statist social contract theories came to prominence in academia, as he testifies, at the insistence of Jewish professors. Yet none can gainsay him on the subject of the social attitudes of the American colonists. Fischer comments:

[R]eform was regarded in Massachusetts as a process of recovery and preservation. Reformation meant going backward rather than forward, on the assumption that error was novel and truth was ancient in the world. The Protestant Reformation meant a reversion to primitive Christianity. In politics reform was a return to the ancient constitution. In society it meant a revival of ancestral ways.6

That is, Reformed theology compelled them to a deeply conservative attitude in terms of their ethnic lineage. The Puritans in New England and the Presbyterians of Virginia were equally protective of their ethnic genealogies, prizing of course equal yoking in race as indispensable to equal yoking in the spirit. All in accord with Scripture, of course.

Even Samuel Huntington has confessed as much:

America is a founded society created by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers, almost all of whom came from the British Isles. . . . They initially defined America in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, and most importantly religion.7

But John Jay affirmed the same long ago:

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.8

Buchanan has tendered a concise explanation of this subject from biblical reference:

The 133rd Psalm speaks of an embryonic nation: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” The word occurs even earlier in the Old Testament. Genesis 10:32, after listing the descendants of Noah, relates: “these are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations; and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.”

In Genesis 12, God makes His promise to Abram, “I will make of thee a great nation,” and gives him a new name, Abraham, the “father of many nations.” God promises to make a great nation of his son Ishmael. Arabs trace the origin of their peoples to Ishmael. God told Rebekah two nations were struggling in her womb: Esau and Jacob.

“Nation – as suggested by its Latin root nascere, to be born – intrinsically implies a link of blood,” wrote Peter Brimelow in the National Review in 1992. “A nation in a real sense is an extended family. The merging process through which all nations pass is not merely cultural, but to a considerable extent biological through intermarriage.”
Brimelow describes a nation as an ‘ethno-cultural community – an interlacing of ethnicity and culture.9

The reason North is haunted by this Hiraeth and cannot reckon with the tragic erasure of his natal culture is because his abstract Austrian economic lens translates all the world into economic terms. Libertarianism casts nation as synonymous with economy. Yet the two are quite different things. As French historian Ernest Renan concluded, “A Zollverein is not a fatherland.” An economic system is not a nation.

But one cannot imagine a more foolish statement coming from a claimant of Christ – especially a supposed Theonomist such as Wilson – because it is 180 degrees from the position of R.J. Rushdoony, who not only held borders to be biblically mandated hedges between peoples, but emphasized that the preservation of those peoples themselves is the divinely-decreed object of borders.10

The Neo-Theos are walking in the steps not of Rushdoony, but of men like Milton Friedman. Friedman advanced the idea that open borders was the historic American position. But Friedman’s theory of borders is no truer from the vantage of American history than from biblical prescription:

As you all know, until 1914 America had completely free immigration. Anyone could get on a boat and come to these shores; and if he landed on Ellis Island, he was an immigrant. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? You will find hardly a soul who will say it was a bad thing. Almost everyone will say it was a good thing.

In the United States, opposition to immigration has a long history, starting in the late 1790s, in reaction to an influx of political refugees from France and Ireland. The Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 restricted the rights of immigrants. Nativism first gained a name and affected politics in mid-19th century United States because of the large inflows of immigrants from cultures that were markedly different from the existing Protestant culture. Nativists objected primarily to Roman Catholics, especially Irish Americans. Nativist movements included the American Party of the mid-19th Century (formed by members of the Know-Nothing movement).

North, Wilson, Marinov, and Friedman are just plain wrong about the traditional American view of immigration. Both the Stamp Act and Declaration of Independence overtly mention the American Indians as outside our nation without qualification. The preamble to our Constitution specified that the republic was founded only for “ourselves and our posterity.” And the founding congress’s very first act expressly limited citizenship to White people, and suffrage was limited from colonial times to landed White males over the age of twenty-one. Thus, anyone of another race who came to our shores did so only under the terms of their never having the option of citizenship or suffrage. So it was that our founders arranged immigration policy with little incentive given to non-Europeans. They insisted ostensibly upon the old Israelite policy that no matter how long other races might tarry as denizens in the land, they were a “mixed multitude” forever camping apart and distinct from our nation.

Moreover, Dabney has left us a most detailed account of both Virgina’s extensive colonial and post-independence measures against the importation of foreign races.11 He concludes that account with a summary the founding sentiment held in common North and South:

And the reprobation of that national wrong [the slave trade forced upon us by the Crown], with regret for the presence of the African upon the soil, was the universal feeling of that generation which succeeded the Revolution. . . . They were sober, wise, and practical men, who felt that to protect the rights, purity, and prosperity of their own country and posterity, was more properly their task than to plead the wrongs of a distant and alien people. . . . They deprecated the slave trade, because it was peopling their soil so largely with an inferior and savage race, incapable of union, instead of with civilized Englishmen.12

The moratorium on slave importation was predicated not upon the abuses of the trade itself – though that was certainly a concern – but upon the universal conviction that the proliferation of a foreign race on our soil presaged disaster for our people (the White race) on this continent. Which is to say that the slave trade was abolished foremost to prevent the influx of non-White races into our country. And though the state of Virginia was the first state in Christendom to outlaw their import/immigration, all the Christian nations quickly followed suit under the same rationale: separatism. Beyond the matter of their importation, whether we are speaking of Abraham Lincoln in America, or William Wilberforce in England, even the radical Abolitionists who came later generally argued their case not under the pro-miscegenationist doctrine of modern Alienists, but just the opposite, pursuant of a more rigid segregation – total deportation of the whole Black population. This had been the default position of Henry Clay’s Whig party before it became a Republican one. In contrast to the later Republican plan of immediate forced expulsion of the whole African race stood the much more temperate position of the Confederates – that of generational manumission and gradual repatriation of the Africans to their ancestral homelands. But that is only to say that while North and South came to differ on the subject of how this slavery was to end, and how the Black man would be removed from our land, both hemispheres agreed on racial separatism. In fact, many Northern states outlawed even the temporary presence of Blacks in their borders at any time, for any reason.

Prior to the war a moderate and bipartisan attempt at African deportation was implemented under president Monroe. As the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian explains that policy, “In 1816, a group of white Americans founded the American Colonization Society (ACS) to deal with the ‘problem’ of the growing number of free blacks in the United States by resettling them in Africa.” The roster of support for the ACS was a who’s who of American Founders. Thomas Jefferson (the author of both the Virginia Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) and James Madison (the ‘Father of the Constitution’), among others, were ardent supporters of this unabashed White Nationalist policy.

What’s more, the Virginian House of Burgesses actually attempted banning all African immigration to the colonies many times prior to any such efforts by New England and prior to Independence, though all such motions were vetoed by the British Crown. But no sooner had Americans won our freedom than Virginia abolished the import of black slaves. They were the first state on earth to do so.

So then, from the colonial and founding eras, Americans had limited citizenship to Whites only and outlawed the import – the only means by which non-Whites could make these shores at the time – of Blacks. The authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution organized deportations of said race explicitly for the sake of preserving our European stock here. And we went on to fight a grueling internecine war, brother against brother, in large part to determine how best to mitigate the damage of the non-White presence on this continent and under what policy they would best be removed from our shores.

Then came the saga of America’s war with Mexico, including our men’s sacrifice at the Alamo: Sam Houston’s famous statement epitomized the American sentiment – “I didn’t come to Texas to live under the Greaser’s yoke.” Make no mistake, Americans and Texans laid down their lives at the Alamo not for any Austrian economic model or anachronistic abstractions such as ‘equality’, but simply to keep the Mexicans out. The annexation of California was pursued on like grounds – to rescue the Spanish (White) Rancheros from Mestizo domination.

It wasn’t until the late 1800s that the synergy of the industrial revolution and colonialism opened passage to America for sundry races, thereby making necessary overt codification of the principles always presupposed in our founding documents and religion. Americans’ Christian, populist response was adamant nativism, which culminated in a slew of border-and-race-conservative legislation such as the U.S.-China Burlingame Treaty of 1868, the Angell Treaty of 1880, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, and the Immigration Act of 1924 among others. None of which was throughout those years imagined for “un-American” in the least. On the contrary, everyone from the parson to the Supreme Court justice insisted that such measures were necessary applications of Christian Common and Constitutional law applied to the circumstance of the increasing mobility of foreign races.

Though Lincoln’s revolutionary, socialistic, and never-ratified 14th amendment inverted the purpose and meaning of the federal constitution by alchemically declaring the Africans in our midst ‘Americans,’ it was subsequently taken for granted by everyone from the Supreme Court Justice to the buggy whip maker that the African’s new government-bestowed identity as an ‘American’ would forever retain an indelible asterisk, because even if they had been declared citizens by a contrivance of bureaucratic imagination, they simply weren’t of the American genos as we knew God to have made us, nor as our founders had defined us. It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century when Arabs, Chinese, Mexicans, and others would have the same alchemy continually applied on their behalf through fiat courtcraft by Leftist-activist judges in denial of all foregoing Christian law. Because they were bent on deconstructing the American people as a means of deconstructing the world order of Christendom and, thereby, Christianity itself.

Yet prior to this, the case is conclusive that American policies on citizenship, the franchise, and border enforcement exemplified from the earliest times what may be called Theonomic White Nationalism and Racial Protectionism – concepts so taken for granted that they were known only as “patriotism.” But today, we know them by the theological term Kinism.

So when Friedman postulated his open-borders libertarianism on the premise that America was ‘always’ an open-borders economic abstraction, he was lying through his teeth. And the new Alienist doctrine which men such as Marinov, McDurmon, Wilson, and North have built upon that lie is revealed for a most absurd mythology. Inasmuch as our fathers knew the ethnic protectionism of historic America only as patriotism, the alternative – racial egalitarianism, propositionalism, economism – posited equally by Austrian economists as much as Straussians, Fabians, and Marxists, would be understood by our Christian fathers as naught but Treason.

We were not advised about any of these changes. We were not consulted on the question of whether we wanted to overturn everything that made us who we were. It was done to us. They who have force-fed Americans this alien perspective via their academia-media monopolies – the likes of Emma Lazarus, et al. – have imposed this lie to the point that the alternative – patriotism – is nearly forgotten completely.

It is no mere coincidence that the loss of that halcyon social capital and all the little vestigial threads of common affection and symbol bequeathed to North’s generation were perceptibly severed most harshly in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration Act. These incantational hexes on Western civilization were twin forces of destruction, together elevating the alien over us and flinging wide the gates to their hordes. This, much more than any of the foregoing abolitionist and suffragette movements, marks what Grizzard coined “the coming of the ‘isms'” – the mainstreaming of revolutionary and counterculture penological concepts like ‘racism,’ ‘sexism,’ ‘xenophobia,’ ‘homophobia,’ ‘Islamophobia’, etc. All of which were previously conceived as under the umbrella of Christian virtues of patriotism and patriarchy.

All of the things of which North bemoans our loss were secured in his youth only by an array of social supports which he himself decries. As Lichtman again explains through gnashing teeth:

Taken together, the prohibition of vice, anticommunism, conservative maternalism, evangelical Protestantism, business conservatism, racial science and containment, and the grassroots organizing of the Ku Klux Klan formed a stout defense of America’s white Protestant, free enterprise civilization.13

North and all his ilk have planted their feet in the shifting sands opposite said position. The legal maxim, Salus populi, suprema lex – “The safety of the people is the highest law” – is but a synthesis of the second table of the Decalogue. But the neo-Theonomists spurn it. These gross inversions are not foremost the fault of non-Whites. Principally, the efficient cause is to be found inside the gates, in our own White churches. As an Austrian-Libertarian-Postmillennialist, the underlying assumption which North carries into consideration of American society is identical to that of the hardcore Atheists, Communists, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, Mexican illegals, and Trotskyite NeoCons: the social contract theory. He accepts that American identity subsists by the alchemical stew of geographic proximity, civil creedalism, and the magisterial state.

Of signal import in John Jay’s writing on America’s “one connected people” of common ancestry, habit, tradition, and religion in Federalist No. 2 is that his words preceded our constitutional founding! That means Jay considered the American nation to have preexisted the American federal government. Such sentiments, if voiced today, are derided as ‘racist’ and outside the respectability of men like North and Trotsky.

Rounding into the year of our Lord 2016, we see now the forebodings of our forebears like de Tocqueville, R.L. Dabney, Madison Grant, et al., met with all the confirmations of history. If their contemporaries affirmed their prescient perception of the natural consequences of race-egalitarianism, their posterity cannot but affirm them prophets, because we see now the fruit of the gnostic-abstractionist theories of nationhood in full bloom all about us. Though a keen critic of all the dysfunction of statism, North’s gnostic view of nationhood guarantees the inexorable entrenchment of the very thing he reviles. His laissez-faire economism ensures to be overrun by aliens who not only vote for ever more government, but through the violence and general dysfunction endemic to their nationalities, actually create a perceived need for the very oppressive nanny-police state which the Libertarians otherwise abjure. Sheriff Taylor and Deputy Fife just don’t stand a chance against all the equatorial warlords pouring into our borders. Which is why North’s view aligns so seamlessly with the Straussians, the Fabians, and the Marxists who presently define the mainstream and presume to redefine who we are. The Misesian Theonomists have nonetheless thrown in with the core conviction of the Radical Left that American identity is conceptual rather than real: not national at all, but notional. If Mr. North may quibble over the centralization under Lincoln, and state compulsion in contracts, he nonetheless affirms the core convictions of all the cookie-cutter Leftists like James Forsyth:

Your family could have arrived on the Mayflower or in the back of a van, but if you believe in the values of this country as embodied by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, and the Civil Rights Act, then you are American.

There is nothing more artificial, more insubstantial and more dangerous than categorising a nation according to ideology–this is to make honest disagreement over political principles a betrayal of the nation itself. It is to make dissent into a kind of treason; it is to make fidelity to older traditions that contradict the reigning ideology a mark of disloyalty to the nation. Fundamentally it is also to confuse ideas for concrete realities and to give them the loyalty we owe to real things. It is to ignore the concrete realities of kin and place and our memory of our kin and place down through the centuries for the sake of abstractions. This sort of thinking may very well make it easier for people to enter the country, but it makes it impossible to say any longer what kind of country it is, where it came from or who we are as a people.

These men have disavowed nationalism for notionalism – a creedal nation, a nation without natality – which is no nation at all. Even those Christians who have bought into this concept have done so by reverse-engineering their lately appended political ideology (of only the last fifty years) into their theology; but rather than undergirding their abstractionist civics, their politics prove to entirely confound their religion. Citing biblical descriptions of a “spiritual nation” of Christians is all well and good. Creedalism is certainly indispensable to orthodoxy; however, our inclusion in the spiritual nation of believers is not even determined by our theology, but by the grace of God alone. For if our membership in the kingdom were predicated upon our present confession, we would be speaking of neither covenantalism nor monergism at all, but a works-righteousness and anthropocentric synergism. Regeneration precedes justification in the ordo salutis. God elects men apart from and prior to their actions – including our professions of faith.

Even on a practical level, if we adopted the idea that an ever-present confession was what sealed a person’s place in the covenant, infants, the senile, and the mentally deficient would all face excommunication and, presumably, damnation. Even if these things have never been conceived in such a way (for not even Arminians treat their confessionally incapable children and elders in keeping with this anthropocentric view of membership), and even if they make nonsense of soteriology and communion, it grants them no real remedy in matters political, civic, or national. To bestow natality incantationally in this way not only stands all human history and biblical law on their heads, but openly defies all the biblical language of the table of nations (Gen. 10; 11), because none therein are so counted by their political subscriptionism, theology, or economic models, but are included exclusively on account of their lineage – and that secondarily reinforced by their respective linguistic-cultural expressions. Tirasians are counted as such not on account of their professing ‘Tirasian values’ or taking part in a ‘free market,’ but because they descended from Tiras and were born among their brethren. If the Tirasians adopted a theory of peoplehood such as the present egalitarianism, they would have quickly found themselves strangers in their own land, just as Mr. North bemoans now with respect to the American.

Yes, he may pine for a universal laissez-faire society under a minimal state, but in application, it fatally undercuts itself. Not only is Minarchy favored nigh exclusively by Whites, but the presence of violent minorities even dissuades most of us from such ideals. When Honduran headhunters are raping people to death in the streets, no-knock SWAT raids and mandatory curfews start sounding pretty good. While America was certainly founded on Christian principles of liberty, the later ingrafting of the anti-reality creed of racial equality necessarily abrogated that liberty. Our Christian fathers knew it long ago that the Jacobin virtues of liberté, egalité, fraternité were all mutually exclusive concepts: liberty cannot coexist with equality, and if universal equality is assumed, true fraternity is outlawed. The libertarian dream of maximal liberty and non-aggression comes closest to actualization only in the context of homogeneous societies. White ones, especially. Conversely, universal societies such as the fiduciary-multicult utopia dreamt by Libertarians only set an inexorable trajectory for iron-fisted centralization of power under the maximal state. This fact North can neither accept nor escape. In him stirs a faint voice of Christian conscience, but his ideology yet demands that he bless the curses, and pronounce them pure.

From the cloister of his temporarily safe White enclave he may yet console himself by putting his feet up on that antique American-made desk, and enjoy a cup of Earl Grey, while listening to his old Glenn Miller records once more, as the mocha-colored Americans* plot to burn everything he ever loved to the ground and strike it from all memory.

Ehud Would is a Conservative Presbyterian of Scandian-Germano-Celtic background and a refugee from the reconquista state of Southern California, who having recently followed the Northwest Imperative, resettled his family in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho where he pursues writing, illustration, medical administration, and presides as an elected official.

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Faith & Heritage is a consortium of Christian writers from a traditionalist perspective. F&H features a diverse range of opinions among its writers, and any particular opinion expressed is not necessarily indicative of universal agreement among F&H admins or writers.

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Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. - Deuteronomy 32:7-8